


Transactive Memory

by dimircharmer



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Ensemble Cast, Gen, Non Linear Narrative, Taako centric, as if that wasn't obvious lmao, what is lost by losing not only memory but the people who you relied on for a century
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-15
Updated: 2017-07-15
Packaged: 2018-12-02 09:07:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11506188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dimircharmer/pseuds/dimircharmer
Summary: As it turns out, when you take someone's friends, their family, their memories from them, they aren't a better person for it.-Taako is a simple, idiot wizard. He used to be part of something grander.





	Transactive Memory

 

\--

A philosopher named Daniel Wegner this beautiful theory called transactive memory, which is the observation that we don’t just store information in our minds, or in specific places; we store memories and understanding in the people we love… Little bits of ourselves reside in other people’s minds.

When one half of a long term marriage dies, the remaining partner often says that a part of them has died along with their spouse. Wegner has this heartbreaking riff about how this is literally true. When your loved one dies, everything you have stored in that person dies along with them.

-Malcolm Gladwell, “The Prime Minister and the Prof,” _Revisionist History._

\---

 

From very early, it was clear that Lup, even before she called herself Lup, was a master of pure force. When they were learning their first cantrips, Taako accidentally  turned himself blue.

Lup set the roof on fire.

They were moved to another home the next day.

As they grow older, Lup can summon storms and shoot lightning bolts, cackling and surrounded by power, weaving arcane energy out of the air itself. She becomes a channel between the plane of magic and the prime material plane, a conduit sparking too bright to be contained.

Taako, instead, pushes limits a different way. He teaches himself to blink in and out of existence, to walk amidst the planes and upside down on walls, to bend stone to it’s will and open holes in the fabric of reality where existence wants to hold fast and stay. Taako likes to poke and prod at the edges, to determine not only where the principles of magic are strongest, but where they are weakest, to pull at the loose threads and figure out what you can do with the scraps. Lup has only ever been interested in the parts of the fabric of reality she can use as bowstrings.

-

Gundren Rockseeker folds his hands on the table, and looks Taako up and down with a critical eye.

“And what can you bring to the table then?”

“Me?” Taako says mock flattered, fluttering his eyelashes and pressing a hand to his breast, “Why I’m a wizard, sweet lips. I can make water, I can get us up and down a cliff in comfort, I can conjure rope out of thin air-”

“Well that’s great,” Rockseeker interrupts him, “but if something attacks us can you kill it?”

Taako blinks.

“Oh.” He says. “Yeah no problem.”

“Great,” he says, and shakes Taako’s hand, “You’re hired.”

\--

The fourteenth time Taako has to learn algebra, he opens the textbook meant for children, and realizes the planet has a base six counting system. On the last planet, he had just gotten a grasp on the no-decimals, no-fractions system before they left ignobly, and had even found the simple binary of the one before that helpful. But as he looks at math meant for fucking _gradeschoolers_ , with it’s cartoon fruit and circular fucking multiplication tables, he stands up and very calmly hurls the damn book off the prow of the Starblaster.

Fuck it.

Barry’s better at this stuff anyway.

-

Taako is trying, desperately, to make sense of the account book in front of him. As it turns out, not even a goddamn _wizard_ can make a chequebook balance itself.

Also as it turns out, taking a travelling show on the road is all kinds of _wicked_ expensive.

There’s horses to keep fed, and supplies to buy, and every other podunk town they pass through has their own different goddamn currency which has to be converted in and out of gold pieces, and Taako is literally tearing his hair out trying to make the numbers talk any kind of sense at him.

They keep slipping sideways, his marginal math looks like a toddler’s, numbers backwards, he’s dropping digits and forgetting to carry ones and he’s got this _itch_ that if he just reinvented the entire fucking numeric system it would make more sense and-

“Hey,”

One of the cleanup crew he hired in this town, Caesar or Tazeem or something, is staring at him.

“Hey,” Taako says back, flipping him a thousand-candle grin, “You like the show hun?”

“Yeah,” the man says, grinning at him, “I’ve been following you for a couple of weeks actually. You put on a hell of an act. You need a manager?”

Taako raises an eyebrow, and leans back nonchalantly on the cracked chair held together with a paste spell and twine.

“You any good with numbers sweet thing?”

The man blushes, and extends a hand, “Sazed. And I’m ok, I guess?”

“Good enough for me Sazed, you got yourself a job.”

\--

The Tres Horny boys are good at many things. Finding the shortest distance between themselves and trouble, for instance. Causing havoc. Turning a regular situation into a wildly dangerous one at the drop of a proverbial hat.

Decision making is not one of those things.

They stare at the headquarters of the Sharks, doing nothing.

“So, do we just knock on the door and ask someone?” Taako says.

“I mean, that doesn’t sound _great,”_ Merle hedges

“Well if you’ve got a better idea speak up homie, ‘cause we’re burning daylight here,” Taako replies.

“I say we just storm the building,” Magnus says, “We could be in and out pretty quick, just one-two punch.”

“Do you even remember what we’re here to get?” Taako asks him,

“Uhhhh,” Magnus says, “Yes?”

“Besides,” Merle says, “Didn’t the little one, the monk say not to kill anybody?”

“Oh yeah,” Magnus says, “What was her name again?”

“Uhhh, shit,” Merle says, “You know, I don’t remember.”

They all stare at the entrance to the hideout.

“What if I just go up and knock on the door?” Taako says again.

-

 

“Captain,” Magnus called at him, six of them turning in unison to face Davenport, a hundred years of training at their fingertips, instinct ground bone deep, trusting their captain their leader their _friend_ above all else,“sir, what do we do?”

Captain Davenport raises himself up to his full three-foot height, and starts snapping orders and barely pausing for breath, and the last remnants of the IPRE jump into action around him.

\--

“Hey Agatha-”

 “It’s Agnus, sir.”

-

 “Agnes-”

 “Angus, sir.”

-

 “Angel darling-”

 “Flattering sir, but I am not fantasy wrestler Jeff Angel, who values hard work, integrity and calling his dad every day! I am Angus McDonald, boy detective and your apprentice!”

-

 “Agustus!”

 “Sir, now I feel like you’re mocking me.”

-

 “Hey Lucretia, who was that person, a couple of cycles ago, with that really great hardtack recipe? The one with rosemary and seasalt right on the ocean?”

 Lucretia blinked up at him, “The half elf or his husband?”

 “Whichever one was the baker.”

“Beaton, the dwarf,” she said turning back to her book, “You remember, with the beaded curtain and the stained glass pieces in the window.”

 “I am declaring these Beaton Biscuits!” Taako says grandly, pulling them out of the oven, in honour of that _magnificent_ bread.”

 --

 

 

 “You know,” Magnus, one night around a campfire, “I never built anything larger than a porch? I never got the hang of that structural stuff. I always wanted build a house some day, but I’ve got no idea how.”

 “Hey, well we used to do barn raisings once, twice a summer back home,” Merle says, ladling himself some of the too-plentiful soup, “I could show you the ropes.”

 Taako kicks back and watches them talk, and allows himself the pleasure of idly wondering what to do with the leftover soup, not where his next meal is going to come from, or if someone who knew someone from Glamour Springs is going to kill him in the night. He just kicks back and listen to them talk, to them enthusiastically talk about what kinds of plants can grow on porch trellises, about how best to cut beams for a roof.

 They draw straws for watch order, but swap them amongst themselves immediately anyway.

 It feels, though he only met these people a few days ago, almost like a home.

 --

 Taako’s experience with illusion magic begins and ends with disguise self. If he can’t blast his way out of a problem, he’s sure as hell not going to be able to _talk_ his way out of one, no matter whose face he was wearing.

 -

 Davenport used to make the most beautiful landscapes; oceans scenes tumultuous in storm, lush rainforests full of rich gold light, sunsets that captured the way the light got thick as honey on late summer days. He would project them on the windows of the ship, in the blackness between worlds, and it was like Candlenights, each of them racing room to room to see how the beautiful, impossible landscape changed from each perspective.

 

Once, he created an entire underwater paradise for them, complete with mermaid hiding shyly behind a rock, visible only from Lucretia’s window, which waved at them, when they finally spotted it. Davenport hid a smile under his moustache for days, after that one.

 

\--

 The single, hands down, balls out craziest thing Taako has ever seen Magnus do was leap off a cliff towards them.

 Taako caught him with a feather fall on the way down, but-

 “Yeah, but you caught me, right?” Magnus doesn’t even looked fazed, afterwards.

 “Sure,” Taako says, “but-”

 “Nah, no buts,” Magnus says, “that’s just how this works.”

 --

"Hey Taako, Do you know what that star is called?"

 

Magnus is pointing straight up, through the pines at a cluster of stars above them.

 

"I don't know shit about shit, my guy," Taako says.

 

Magnus Hums, and Taako sees his brow furrow. "Me neither."

 

\--

 

 Taako and the other two, Merle and Magnus, fit together like loose bolts. They do the job, but they _rattle_. Magnus sometimes dives out of the way of spells Taako hadn’t even cast yet, leaving Taako open to take hits. Merle sometimes misses completely with healing zones, catching them on the ragged edge of it’s area of effect, or even missing entirely. Taako can’t seem to quite grasp when to use his spell slots for utility purposes and when to just bust out maximum damage.

 Sometimes though, they work like absolute _clockwork_. Magnus tosses Taako high enough in the air to drop a field of effect on all their enemies, and clears a spot for him to gently levitate back down into. Merle is a quite literal holy terror, radiating light and making each of Magnus’s swings hit harder, hit faster, and keeping all of them pristine.

 It makes it harder somehow, that they don’t move like that all the time.

 That sometimes Taako snickers at a joke and the other two stare at him blank faced, or that Merle preaches them when they couldn’t care less, or when Magnus turns from brash, loud comrade, near a friend, to quiet, grief stricken, can’t-get-out-of-bed-for-days stranger.

 They feel like broken clockwork. Sometimes they work in absolute unison, but more often all they do is catch on each other’s teeth and tear themselves apart.

 They train and train for hours, _weeks_ on the moonbase to try and get at that easy grace again, and the whole while the director watches, hands twisting at her staff, Davenport at her side, two sets of eyes staring at them in utter silence.

 --

Lup has always loved hopeless causes. Hell, she stuck by _him_ all those years, didn’t she? She was always the only person that could talk him into situations like risking his fucking neck trying to forestall the inevitable, or _out_ of the easiest, most risk free path. For all that she was his moral compass, he was her moderation. Of all of them, even compared to Merle, she had the highest death rate, staying behind on plane after plane to help the locals escape. Only Taako and Barry, begging her not to let them see her fucking die _again_ could stop her, and then only sometimes.

 -

“No fucking way, Taako’s _good out here_.”

-

“Hey dumbass,” Taako says to Lup, “We can’t save everyone. I know you won’t stop trying, but-”

 

“Yeah,” Lup says, staring over the pillar of smoke, last known location of the Light of Creation, now a smoldering ruin. “Yeah. I know you’re right but-”

 

“We _can’t_ , Lup. Some days we have to get the fuck out and fight another day.”

 

She buries her head in his shoulder.

 

“I can’t wait,” she says, “until there are no more fucking ‘another day’s.”

 

“C’mere,” Taako says, “I bet I can find something to cheer you up.”

 --

Taako doesn't know how to ride a horse, but he does know how to talk to one. Magnus can't talk to a horse, but he can hook it up to a wagon. Merle can't do either of those things, but he can heal the beast when it was sick. 

 

None of them particularly like horses, though. They make it work.

\--

 

“Mag the-”

 

“Gotcha Barry!.”

 

“Captain!”

 

“On it, Lucretia-”

 

“For the love of Pan someone grab Taako!”

 

“Got my brother my dude!”

 

“Everybody on the ship before I have to say it again! Move! That’s an order!”

 

And so it went for a century.

__

 

Taako, perhaps, was absentminded and forgetful, too much of a coward to be a hero, too highly specialized to be useful, too petty to be kind.

 

But who wouldn’t be, absent six sevenths of their mind, heart, and soul?

**Author's Note:**

> never thought I'd be writing TAZ fic, but here we are.


End file.
